Lana Peters, the only daughter of the late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, has died. Peters, born Svetlana Alliluyeva to Stalin and his second wife Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva, passed away in Wisconsin last Tuesday. She was 85 and had been battling colon cancer, according to the Richland County coroner.
Peters was married three times and had three children. Her first marriage to Grigory Morozov, whom she met while studying at Moscow University, ended in 1947 after just two years. They had a son, Iosif. Peters then married Yuri Zhdanov, the son of one of Stalin’s close associates, and gave birth to a daughter, Yekaterina. They divorced after just 1 year of marriage. Peters defected to the West in 1967 after the death of Brajesh Singh, an Indian communist whom she fell in love with after meeting him in Moscow. They were never allowed to marry. Peters was granted political asylum in the United States after denouncing communism and criticizing her father as a “moral and spiritual monster.”
Peters married architect William Wesley Peters in the United States in 1970. They welcomed a daughter, Olga, before divorcing in 1973. She renounced the U.S. to return to the Soviet Union in the ‘80s, but problems with her family forced her to return to America.
Peters wrote four books, including the best-selling memoir “Twenty Letters to a Friend.”
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